Big Picture

Great political mantras started with “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Can we expect anything as inspiring in this election?

After 30 years of coverups, what really happened when a Chinook helicopter crashed in 1994, killing key personnel involved in Britain’s battle with the IRA?

Just when cinema really needs a bit of sunshine and uplift, along comes a Megaflopolis

The art that brought Paris back from the dead

The film festival is now about making deals, but in its early days it was about making stars, as young Europeans mixed with Hollywood’s elite

How one night of music inspired Kandinsky’s Blue Rider movement

Photographer Polly Braden has spent two years following the lives of Ukrainian women and children displaced by Putin’s invasion

In an edited extract, the author of a new book explores the eerie ruins of an abandoned resort in the island’s ‘forbidden zone’

After years of false starts, the Channel Tunnel opened 30 years ago this week. Yet Brexit shows that it has failed to bring us closer to Europe

A new exhibition of Hetherington’s greatest photographs is not of guns and bombs – but of the men who use them

Amid all the glories of Paris, the Pompidou Centre stands as a monument to modernism and to the man whose name it bears

In Brooklyn’s Little Odessa, Russians and Ukrainians live side by side, in the shadow of a distant conflict

Despite some attempts at prohibition, the tradition goes on in Spain. Like that of the bulls, its own demise will be a long, drawn-out affair

The youth movement of the 1950s was rooted in Britain’s working class, but its influence and notoriety spread across the continent

When Yugoslavia’s dictator split with Stalin in 1948, his potential rivals – politicians, intellectuals, businessmen – found themselves exiled

In a subterranean game of cat and mouse beneath the streets of the French capital, cataflics hunt cataphiles in the city’s prohibited labyrinths

For centuries, the city has had an inclusive relationship what locals call the femminielli, celebrating the joy and glamour of the third sex

We could be 100 days away from a far right takeover of the European Parliament. But is winning headlines the same as winning votes?

An attempt to kayak the Northwest Passage turned into a close-up look at a new, very cold war

Is a masterpiece diminished simply because lots of people like it? Of course not

From Kyiv, a leading photographer shares her thoughts and images of what Russia’s aggression looks like close-up

As Sunak’s ban on new smokers opens up another war within the Conservative Party, is our relationship with tobacco coming to an end?

The German Jewish writer defied the Nazis by producing a magazine from his hiding place in Holland. They are testament to his life and times

The story of the fateful real-life race that inspired Michael Mann’s Ferrari movie

The farmer blockades show that Emmanuel Macron and the City of Light must put on a winning show this summer for a deeply divided country

A thawing ice rink, frosty relations between some competitors and a distinct lack of fans couldn’t stop the success of Chamonix 1924

The creator of the first totalitarian state died on January 24, 1924. His body was viewed by the faithful in temperatures of -35C

The continent became a safe haven in the postwar years for American musicians escaping racism and drugs. Decades on, they are still coming

The biggest and most dangerous surf in the world lies off Portugal, just 90 minutes north of Lisbon

Our diarist gives his personal rundown of who has been good – and who has been bad – over the last 12 months

From the unmistakable face of The Pogues to an actor whose beauty often masked her brilliance, they summed up the defiance and the diversity of a continent

Each new performance is a comment on his genius.. and his vile antisemitism